Principal Staff Software Engineer

Bernard Nickels & Associates; Port Washington (NY); On-site; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Bernard Nickels & Associates seeks a Staff Software Engineer to lead Platform engineering in Port Washington, NY, guiding architectural decisions and setting standards for a robust core platform.

You will partner with Product, Design, and Infrastructure to align technical strategy with business outcomes, define contracts, and drive feature roadmaps while ensuring long-term stability of data pipelines and systems.

Qualifications

• Total Experience: 10+ years of professional software engineering (8+ years with cross-team scope).
• Proven history of leading multi-team or multi-domain initiatives from design to production deployment.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Responsibilities

• Lead high-impact initiatives on the proprietary core platform, driving architectural design and organizational standards.
• Define frameworks, patterns, and contracts that all engineering teams build upon while retiring technical debt at scale.
• Partner with Product, Design, and Infrastructure to align technical strategy with business outcomes and shape feature delivery roadmaps.
• Connect independently designed custom applications, business systems, and data pipelines to ensure long-term stability and interoperability.
• Drive operational excellence, operational readiness, and mentor engineering talent across the organization.

Skills

Technical leadership

Architectural design

Mentorship

Cross-team collaboration

Communication

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Python

Django REST Framework

TypeScript

Angular

GraphQL

PostgreSQL

Azure

Terraform

CI/CD

Celery/Redis/Kafka

Job description

• Job Title: Staff Software Engineer, Platform
• Type: Permanent / Full-Time
• Location: Port Washington, NY 11050
• Compensation: Negotiable

Position Summary

• Lead high-impact technical initiatives on the proprietary core platform, driving architectural design and organizational standards.
• Define frameworks, patterns, and contracts that all engineering teams build upon while retiring technical debt at scale.
• Partner with Product, Design, and Infrastructure to align technical strategy with business outcomes and shape feature delivery roadmaps.
• Connect independently designed custom applications, business systems, and data pipelines to ensure long-term stability and interoperability.
• Drive operational excellence, operational readiness, and mentor engineering talent across the entire organization.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Lead cross-team and multi-domain technical initiatives with significant system and organizational impact.
• Define organization-wide standards for data modeling, API/GraphQL contracts, testing, accessibility, documentation, and observability.
• Architect shared platform capabilities and services, enforcing strict contract stability and backward compatibility.
• Cohesively connect core custom platforms with enterprise business systems (NetSuite, Salesforce), EDI, and reporting tools.
• Shape technical strategy in partnership with Product, Design, and Infrastructure leadership to construct feature and technical remediation roadmaps.
• Facilitate architecture and design reviews; author and socialize comprehensive technical design documents.

Platform Quality, Delivery & AI Governance

• Identify, quantify, and strategically sequence technical debt removal to improve system quality without delaying feature delivery.
• Execute complex end-to-end migrations and platform upgrades using feature flagging, verification strategies, and clear rollback plans.
• Improve organization-wide engineering KPIs, including build/deploy times, change failure rates, MTTR, p95 latency, and test reliability.
• Establish standards for safe AI-assisted development, focusing on code review rigor, test coverage, and secure handling of proprietary data.
• Ensure all platform architectures satisfy compliance, validation, audit-trail, and data-integrity requirements.

Operations & Cross-Functional Partnership

• Own operational readiness for platform services by defining SLOs, driving capacity planning, and maintaining alert quality.
• Participate in on-call rotations and lead war rooms/postmortems during major incidents to drive systemic quality fixes.
• Partner closely with Quality Engineering, Infrastructure, Security, and Business Systems to ensure end-to-end reliability.
• Translate business priorities into actionable plans while communicating risks, trade-offs, and constraints candidly.
• Coach and mentor engineers across teams through design facilitation, code reviews, and internal training sessions.

Qualifications & Technical Requirements

Required Experience

• Total Experience: 10+ years of professional software engineering experience (8 years minimum), including 3+ years operating at a Senior (Level III) or higher level with cross-team scope.
• Track Record: Proven history of leading at least one multi-team or multi-domain technical initiative from initial design through production deployment.
• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Core Technical Stack

• Languages & Frameworks: Deep expertise in Python (Django/Django REST Framework) and TypeScript (Angular).
• APIs & Databases: Expert-level knowledge of GraphQL schema design, PostgreSQL data modeling, and query optimization.
• Cloud & Infrastructure: Production experience with major cloud platforms (Azure strongly preferred); comfortable working within Terraform and CI/CD pipelines.
• Distributed Systems: Extensive experience with asynchronous and event-driven architectures (Celery, Redis, Kafka, or equivalents), including failure modes, idempotency, and back-pressure handling.

Operational & Compliance Capabilities

• Production Operations: Demonstrated ownership of production operations, including SLO management, observability, incident command, and postmortems.
• Regulated Environments: Experience in or willingness to work within validated/controlled environments (e.g., GxP, 21 CFR Part 11, SOX, HIPAA, PCI) with change-control constraints.
• AI Tooling: Disciplined use of AI-assisted development tools to increase velocity while remaining accountable for code security and correctness.

Core Competencies

• System Design: Expert-level architecture skills across backend services, data stores, and frontends.
• Distributed Systems Judgment: Deep understanding of caching, queuing, retries, partial failures, and consistency trade-offs.
• Database Evolution: Expertise in schema evolution and safe database migrations on live, high-traffic systems.
• Platform & Engineering Mindset: Focus on reducing long-term system complexity, maintaining stable interfaces, and establishing rigorous test strategies.
• Influence & Mentorship: Ability to align technical and non-technical stakeholders without direct authority and elevate overall engineering talent.